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The Housing Revolution

African-American achievement tends to go hand-in-hand with disdain for failed social experiments like large public-housing projects.

By

Julia Vitullo-Martin

Aug. 18, 2013 10:49 a.m. ET

The dismantling of public housing projects across America has been one of the most astonishing federal initiatives of the past 20 years. After spending billions of dollars to build public housing in every major city, many small ones and some rural areas over a six-decade period, the U.S. government reversed course in the early 1990s and started financing demolition rather than construction. Some 260,000 units out of 1.3 million nationally have been demolished or removed from the public-housing inventory since that time. The government also rescinded long-standing restrictions, such as the requirement that demolished...